Toronto tenants camping in parking lot rather than sleep in bed bug-infested unit

Tenants from two units in a seven-unit building in Toronto’s Kipling and Lakeshore district are sleeping in tents in the building’s parking lot after “cockroaches the size of spoon heads and ravenous bedbugs” infested their apartments. To make matters worse, the parking lot also houses a garbage heap feet away from the tents, and this is home to mice, rats, and raccoons.

While it is normal for some bed bugs to remain after the first treatment (most infestations require three or more treatments before bed bugs are entirely gone), it is not normal for treatment to ruin furniture. Also, an additional factor here is that traditional PCO treatment requires you to sleep in your usual spot in order to act as bait, drawing bed bugs out to the pesticides. While we often want to flee, there’s good reason to stay put.

Nevertheless, it should demonstrate for the uninitiated just how bad bed bugs are, that these folks would sleep next to a garbage pile rather than in their home.

Odd how this article comes on the heels of another that reads “Must tolerate Bed Bugs”.
This article speaks to the reality that people really cannot tolerate bed bugs, and nor should they have to. By this time we all must know that our government, and the Canadian government ,are well aware of this problem. I suppose because they have no real solutions for bed bugs, they prefer to say nothing.

One of the parking lot campers said she’s just moved into the building 2 weeks before. That has to suck.

It’s an attempt to get media notice and it worked–but I wonder if it will work. Also, although I can definitely understand, why would you augment your problems by sleeping next to the building’s garbage?